Blue Mountain Arts Poetry Contest

Leavings
by Melanie Dietzel

Ninth Contest
third Place

I come to sort artifacts, 
as if an archaeologist 
deciding what is refuse, 
what must be preserved. 
Space shifting, 
scattered sweepings, 
habitation given up 
to abandonment.

The room exhales 
a heavy breath, 
Patchouli oppressed 
by ripened sweat socks. 
Scarred walls, 
saturated in Dylan lyrics, 
stand silent now.

Gone, the ponderous oak chest 
unearthed at flea market. 
Gone, too, the bed, its mattress 
imprinted by transmutable form. 
Both, borne away 
in a friend's rusted van.

I pick my way through what remains, 
crumpled Oreo wrappers, 
scattered T-shirts, 
scum-coated dishes. 
I uncover a disjointed 
G. I. Joe trooper, 
old soldier deserted 
on broadloom battlefield. 
Stapled, center-folded beauties, 
once hidden, now forgotten, 
languish on closet floor.

Waiting in the corner, 
a block and board bookcase 
retains its eclectic collection, 
scraps of forest-clad! camp-outs, 
remnants of rafted rivers. 
A trilobite, trapped by mud, 
buried beneath generations 
of sediment, lodges immutably 
in a rock resurrected 
from a creek bed.

Shells, snail, clam, turtle, 
vacated long before discovery, 
rest beneath a coating of dust. 
Exoskeletons of cicadas perch, 
slightly cockeyed, 
beside parchment-fine 
snake skin, and here, 
a chrysalis still clings 
to a desiccated twig. 
The fragile filaments 
that embraced metamorphosis 
are ripped apart, 
its delicate casing 
breached by a creature 
destined to fly.